The present invention relates to networks, data packet routers, and network processors, and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for distributing data flows across a plurality of equal-cost paths of a network or distributing the data flows across a plurality of links of a link aggregation.
Exemplary, known networks comprise a plurality of network processors, routers, switches and gateways (or other such exemplary network processing device) to effect delivery of data from a source point to a destination point. Such a network-processing device receives data at one or more ingress-ports, determines an egress-port to forward the received data and routes the received data to identified egress-ports. The network processing device, thus, continues propagation of the received data through the network, and toward the destination point.
If a particular path or link of the networking device is utilized repetitively, then a data-bottleneck may form so as to limit or restrict data propagation through the network. Therefore, in order to keep data smoothly flowing through the network, it may be desirable to distribute the received data across multiple paths of the network to avoid data-bottlenecking. For a layer-3 environment and protocol, the received data should be distributed across a plurality of paths of equal-cost. Likewise, for layers of the network beneath layer-3, the data flows could be distributed across a plurality of links of a link aggregation. Such data path and link distributions can provide more efficient utilization of the bandwidth available to a network processing device.